Re: the keyboard accessibility capplet

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Jody said, in reply to Havoc:

> > A one-item menu _looks really broken_. I couldn't ship Red Hat Linux
> > 8.0 with that in there, and GNOME upstream shouldn't ship that way
> > either.
> Agreed, but consensus produced the current location.  Would anyone
> object to moving it into Advanced ?

Yes, I would object.  "Advanced" doesn't seem like a good place for
prefs that new users may want/need to change pretty much immediately on
login.  Even if those users are in the minority...

I am sure there will indeed be other capplets in the Accessibility menu,
but those features were not ready for GNOME-2.0.  For instance, there is
at the moment no GUI for turning assistive technology support on and
off.  Right now that doesn't seem like it needs a whole capplet to
itself, but I am pretty certain we will want GUIs for doing things like
setting preferred speech services (something shared among apps, and not
just specific to a screenreader), etc

The one alternative that I think would be OK would be to make the
current keyboard accessibility UI a tab in a general Accessibility
capplet, rather than a menuitem in an Accessibility menu.  Then we could
create an "Assistive Technologies" tab (maybe called something else ;-)
within that capplet.

This would also allow us to simplify the keyboard capplet a little, for
instance we could move the MouseKeys stuff onto its own tab the way XP
does; but we will, I assure you, get complaints if we do that too.

Note that XP's "Accessibility" controls are only simpler if you don't
explore them much.  They have as many as four levels of dialogs launched
from various sub-buttons in the tabs.  Ugh, five UI layers deep into the
capplet?  Even if our GUI is crowded, I think it's better than that!  (I
also note that the Accessibility dialog in XP ignores accessible themes,
so I don't think we should hold it up as an example :-P )

Jody, thanks for your continued explanations below.

best regards,

Bill

> > As I said, I hate to keep bringing it up, but for whatever reason it's
> > still broken... to me if I put all the other control panels next to
> > this one, the accessibility capplet sticks out as very different.
> > 
> > Does no one else agree?
> 
> I suspect we all dislike it (lets avoid pejorative phrases like
> 'broken').  The problem is that given N people there are N+2
> proposed solutions.  If we create the 'make Havoc happy keyboard
> accessibility capplet' then I'll be thwaped from 3 sides by several
> irate people.
> 
> - Mouse keys stay : They are a feature.
> - Global enable/disable stays : This is useful if you're actually
>   using the thing.  Not so much as a ui item but because a
>   non-accessibility user (is there a more PC way to say that ?) can
>   disable things by simply typing, and the accessibility user wants
>   to be able to re-enable.  This mirror the XKB implementation.
> 
> - Slider spinner combo stays : it is useful to accessibility folk.
>   This grew on me.  My preference would be to use this in the other
>   capplets too.  However, it seems better to wait for the usability
>   folk to weigh in on it.
> 
> 
> Open to debate
> - remove import AccessX CDE file : I'd prefer to see this in a
>   migration wizard.  Given that we can't currently generate the file
>   I don't see alot of repeat use for this.
> 
> - button to bring up the keyboard capplet (and the sibling in the
>   keyboard capplet).  I don't see a better choice.  If we merge them
>   the buttons go away, but we preclude the ability to have other
>   accessibility features there.  Replicating the functionality seems
>   really ugly.  What other choice is there ?
> 
> - Moving the capplet into Advanced.  I am not a fan of 1 entry
>   menus.  Unless there is a concrete plan to have something else in
>   there in the near future then this seems like a good idea.
> 
> Havoc the reality here is that neither of us are accessibility
> users.  Therefore we should defer to the insights of people familiar
> with that domain.  You say its broken and ugly.  I'm fed up after
> months of random conflicting complaints.  This was reviewed and
> accepted, and it should stay until something universally accepted as
> better is written.

> Microsoft has oceans of accessibility experts and has done major
> accessibility work in Windows XP, and their accessibility dialog has
> similar features to ours but presented in a better way.

Whoa, do you *really* think so?   Doing something like setting key
debounce timings takes you through something like two notebook tabs and
three dialogs! 

> I believe we can do better.

Than MS?  We already have.

-Bill

> Havoc
>